In Damen

In Damen there’s a bar
where employees loosen their ties
and guzzle beer next to girls who shoplift
poetry from the corner bookstore. 

Seated on a stool, I wrote a poem
that pleases me. 

I returned the following week, attempting
to write more poetry,
but struck out. 

And it’s like a few days ago
when I gazed at an urban sunset,
I said to myself: I must write a poem. 

Or on Monday, I saw a bird bang
against the office window,
I promised to dedicate it a poem. 

Or when I chased after the girl
who paints her body orange
on Michigan Avenue
and she got wind of me while I ran after her
shouting: I gotta write a poem!

Now I scribble next to the barmaid who laughs and puffs a cig
and the employees and girls who laugh and puff,
pilfered books inside their purses. 

While I write, this poem fills with strangers,
readers I have never glimpsed, European readers, my Chinese readers,
Argentines, Arabs…suddenly the poem’s like a bar
where people puff and jabber,
and the only odd-man-out is myself. 

John Keats stated there’s nothing less poetic than a poet.
Poet is to poetry what pipes are to water.
I’d like to add the poet only writes, uses the words, hoists them,
lowers them, brushes them,
a construction worker laying bricks, applying plaster,
the poet builds houses for readers, those ingrates who leave without paying,
and sometimes one puts a shotgun in one’s mouth just because one’s lacking
what’s inside a poem,
and to those who seek and sigh, to the evicted
the poet shelters them, as well as the melancholic, the lovesick, whores,
loonies, retired cops…
as soon as the poet constructs his house
he’s no longer the owner,
so he sets off, building houses elsewhere. 

Night is falling in Damen.
Outside, wind pushes
the swings in the park.
The lights behind the windows turn on.